Ed Wooden and the Highs and Lows of Inventive Collaboration

Infamous 1950s B-movie director Ed Wooden (Johnny Depp) stands at a payphone listening, an keen smile on his face. He appears shocked at what he’s listening to however his expression by no means modifications. “Actually,” he says energetically into the telephone, “Worst movie you ever noticed? Effectively, my subsequent one will likely be higher.” This sheer dedication and optimism are on the coronary heart of Tim Burton’s fashionable and sympathetic 1994 biopic concerning the man deemed “the Worst Director of All-Time.” An outsider determined to be an insider, Wooden’s ambitions have been far larger than his skills, and but he by no means gave up even because the very folks whose validation he craved laughed him out of their places of work and film theaters. He even discovered a muse in childhood hero Bela Lugosi, whose star had light significantly although his need (and in addition monetary want) to maintain working had not. Ed Wooden is many issues — an easy biopic, a loving homage to 1950s B-movies, an underdog story — however it’s additionally concerning the deserves and pitfalls of artistic collaboration in an business that ceaselessly chews folks up and spits them out. Twenty-five years later, Ed Wooden stays Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s finest collaboration, however it’s additionally oddly turn out to be a movie as a lot about their very own partnership as Wooden and Lugosi’s.

Tim Burton’s Ed Wooden (Buena Vista)

Burton and Depp first labored collectively on Edward Scissorhands, the 1990 darkish fable a few lonely younger man with scissors for palms stranded in candy-colored suburbia. Created and left unfinished by a mysterious Inventor (performed by Burton’s childhood idol, Vincent Value, in his final movie position), Edward is the final word outsider of Burton’s filmography: pale, unusual, and determined to be liked and accepted by the world. The city sees Edward as a harmful freak till the Boggs household takes him in and assures their neighbors he’s really mild and shy — till all of them activate him following an accident. The movie’s coda goes the way in which of Frankenstein with the townspeople searching Edward down in his Gothic mansion and asking us to think about who’s the true monster.

Not not like a lot of Ed Wooden’s movies, nearly all of Tim Burton’s movies play with and infrequently subvert the concept of normality. The suburbia of Edward Scissorhands is supposed to really feel uncanny and unusual to somebody like Edward, who has lived on the fringes of it in close to whole isolation. But, Edward additionally appears to grasp that irrespective of how exhausting he tries, he’ll by no means be totally accepted by the folks round him who’ve a narrower view of the world and a restricted tolerance for many who fall exterior their definition of regular.

A lifelong cross-dresser, Ed Wooden actually understood this. His first movie, the semi-autobiographical Glen or Glenda — the making of which is depicted in Ed Wooden — was meant to be a name for tolerance and compassion. However this being 1950s Hollywood on the top of McCarthyism, the studio went the exploitative route, hoping to piggyback off the headlines about Christine Jorgensen’s history-making gender reassignment surgical procedure. The opposite downside — which Burton’s biopic makes clear — was Wooden’s incapacity to reconcile his full lack of expertise and ability along with his imaginative and prescient, resulting in a messy, incoherent movie. As such, any hopes of discovering broader acceptance of his personal gender-nonconforming gown — particularly in a decade of elevated emphasis on “conventional” gender roles post-WWII — have been just about dashed from the beginning.

Glen or Glenda was additionally Wooden’s first movie with Dracula star Bela Lugosi, whom the director idolized. By the early 1950s, Lugosi was in dire straits financially, hooked on morphine (which was used to deal with his sciatica), and largely working in extraordinarily low-budget B-movies, however Wooden nonetheless regarded him as an enormous star. The ‘94 biopic portrays their relationship as one among mutual admiration and true friendship. Depp’s Wooden is all extensive eyes and reverent smiles within the presence of Martin Landau’s Bela Lugosi, particularly on set. Even when he knew how, Wooden doesn’t direct him in any respect, actually — he merely lets Lugosi chew the surroundings, shaking his head as if he can’t imagine his childhood hero is in one among his movies.

Tim Burton’s Ed Wooden (Buena Vista)

In a tour de drive Academy Award-winning efficiency, Landau portrays the horror icon as a lonely man nonetheless desperately clinging to the previous, hoping for acceptance as soon as extra from the business that has largely forgotten him (“I assumed he was useless,” varied characters deadpan all through Ed Wooden). The very issues that made Lugosi good for Dracula — his thick Hungarian accent and barely sinister seems — labored in opposition to him in a enterprise that also has little creativeness in terms of casting. Whereas Wooden didn’t precisely suppose exterior the field both with the roles he gave to Lugosi, it’s not obscure why the actor was drawn to the director. They have been kindred spirits — two males on the fringes of Hollywood who liked making films greater than the rest on the earth. After being advised “no” repeatedly by the business they liked, it will need to have been a reduction to work with somebody who all the time enthusiastically stated “sure” irrespective of how misguided the concept.

So too are Johnny Depp and Tim Burton kindred spirits. The story goes that Depp — wanting to flee the heartthrob monitor post-21 Soar Avenue and Cry Child — wept studying the script for Edward Scissorhands although he was certain a much bigger, extra bankable star can be forged. The studio actually pushed for it, however Burton insists the actor was all the time his first alternative. Depp is almost unrecognizable as Edward — his face caked in pale make-up and faux scars, hair wild, mannerisms twitchy. It’s an astonishing transformation aided additional by Depp’s altogether heartbreaking efficiency. Edward Scissorhands not solely established Depp as a severe expertise but in addition made him Burton’s go-to muse — the person who completely understood Burton’s misunderstood protagonists.

In some methods, Ed Wooden feels as very similar to one among Burton’s peculiar fantasies as any of his different movies, and but the subject material is actual (if often exaggerated). There are not any wigs or weird make-up right here, however Depp nonetheless disappears into Wooden, portraying the director as an indefatigable optimist with an enormous coronary heart who’s clueless concerning the disastrous nature of his work. Depp’s Wooden sees what he needs to see, embracing folks exterior of the world’s definitions of “regular” and turning them into collaborators and buddies. In Wooden’s world, there’s no such factor as “different,” whether or not you’re a washed up horror icon or a B-movie director who likes to put on ladies’s angora sweaters. As soon as once more (and reasonably efficiently), Burton and Depp ask us to think about who the true monsters are: the outsiders making shitty horror flicks or the individuals who have ostracized them?

Nonetheless, regardless of his idiosyncrasies personally and creatively, it will be inaccurate to say Tim Burton has ever really been an outsider himself, contemplating his movies have collectively grossed over $1 billion on the field workplace, and he has a wholesome working relationship with probably the most highly effective leisure firm on the earth aka Disney. The identical is generally true of Johnny Depp, who additionally boasts a profitable Disney relationship and $Three billion in field workplace grosses. The pair might have constructed their careers round movies about outsiders, however neither one has been ostracized fairly like Wooden and Lugosi.

Tim Burton’s Ed Wooden (Buena Vista)

And but, the gloss has light considerably on Burton and Depp lately — each of their work collectively and aside. Hollywood is a spot the place stars rise and fall as simply because the tides of the Pacific — one thing Lugosi knew higher than anybody — and Depp particularly has been on a gradual decline within the public eye. A nasty divorce coupled with allegations of drug and alcohol abuse in addition to home abuse plus main monetary woes have put the actor deeply at odds with a once-adoring public and seemingly sucked the life out of a lot of his work. And the very issues that made his earlier roles so fascinating — equivalent to unusual accents, wigs, and mannerisms — now really feel a bit like a hole shtick. Like Bela Lugosi and Dracula, Depp appears to be clinging to the previous, hoping his most liked onscreen personas — like Captain Jack Sparrow — will likely be sufficient to maintain him financially and critically afloat via current day rejections.

For his half, Tim Burton appears content material to play it secure on the Mouse Home, placing his gloomy aesthetic to work on CGI-heavy re-imaginings of previous Disney properties like Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo. It’s not an enormous shock given the director is a graduate of the legendary CalArts animation program that birthed the animation renaissance of the 80s and 90s however one thing is lacking. He’s nonetheless making movies about outsiders however that too has began feeling like a hole shtick — all Gothic aesthetics with not one of the coronary heart or chunk. Or as Wooden places it within the movie, “no one will discover that! It’s concerning the massive image!”

Ed Wooden by no means had entry to the sources Tim Burton has had for almost all of his profession (and it in all probability wouldn’t have improved the standard of his movies all that a lot anyway) however he made up for it in maverick spirit. Wooden labored with no matter he might get his palms on whether or not it was cardboard alien craft and a stolen faux octopus (“Any individual misplaced the octopus motor, so get in there and shake his legs round!” Wooden yells at Lugosi at one level) or a huge Swedish wrestler with no performing expertise. This was Wooden’s true expertise: assembling a group of people that liked making films and convincing them to do no matter it took to make them. It was guerrilla-style filmmaking in its purest definition.

This additionally occurs to be what makes Ed Wooden so nice. Regardless of its interval setting, it’s Tim Burton’s least flashy film (which additionally makes it his riskiest). Shot fully in black and white and using lots of the identical sensible particular results Wooden himself used, it feels extra like an precise movie from the 1950s proper right down to the actors’ semi-broad line-deliveries. It’s fashionable in the way in which all movies shot in black and white look vaguely fashionable, however Burton doesn’t add something to emphasise the fashion an excessive amount of — he merely works throughout the visible restrictions of the style and time interval. And mixed with a forged and crew of standard, trusted collaborators — Depp included — the movie is the higher and extra private for it. It’s humorous, candy, and compassionate. It’s precisely the sort of movie Wooden all the time dreamed of constructing however merely by no means might.

Tim Burton’s Ed Wooden (Buena Vista)

Ed Wooden can also be, reasonably sarcastically, the least-commercially profitable movie Burton and Depp have made collectively. It linked with critics however not audiences in 1994, who have been offered a film from “the director of Batman, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands” and didn’t fairly know what to make of a biopic a few semi-forgotten B-movie director who favored sporting ladies’s clothes. That appears becoming given audiences within the 1950s didn’t know what to make of Wooden both. However Ed Wooden additionally earned one thing the true Ed Wooden by no means did: two Oscars. Hollywood loves an outsider story even when they’re not all the time very form to outsiders themselves.

“When are we making one other image Eddie?” Lugosi desperately asks Wooden a number of instances all through the movie. He died earlier than Plan 9 From Outer House was accomplished, and in a manner, Wooden’s profession kind of died together with him. He saved making films up till the mid-1970s however by no means discovered something near mainstream acceptance for his work earlier than his dying in 1978— an outsider proper up till the top. Wooden and Lugosi made loads of dreck collectively, however their collaborative relationship gave every a wanted enhance if just for their very own artistic wants. Burton and Depp’s work collectively over the past 29 years has been decidedly blended total — the ingenuity of earlier movies like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wooden has all however disappeared. But their devotion to at least one one other is unshakeable even when a few of their movies really feel as flimsy now as a cardboard gravestone in one among Wooden’s graveyards. “Worst movie you ever noticed?” Effectively, their subsequent one will likely be higher!

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Revisit Ed Wooden and different Burton delights in our previous Filmography sequence…

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